emotional technology

Emotion is IP, Words are TCP

I hope someone out there will understand this.

Emotional signals are higher bandwidth, have more throughput, are often ignored and sometimes unacknowledged.

When you acknowledge the emotional signals sent your way, you can fall in sync with another mind, and exchange words. Slowly, at first, ‘ma ma ma ma ma ma ma’ becomes synonymous with the source of nourishment and love, da da da, burbling, a playful dance of data, with chubby knees scooting on a hardwood floor.

The world accepts, rejects, accepts, rejects, and we learn to build a model of acceptable expression, Overton’s window opens and the bits in flight represent a stable line to another mind – reality, chunks of emotion framed and sent over the wire, packets at a time connect mind to mind.

As we grow older, the emotional multicast signal gets muted, to protected us from NACK-floods and the pushback that comes from crying in public. We learn to use pub/sub protocols and fanout trees to reliably send our messages over TCP frames, always bitsized, with a babel-shuffling protocol at each end to prevent a single message from reliably propogating unless it resonates strongly on the now-mostly-hidden IP channel.

We typically don’t talk about the IP channel over TCP, even though it underlies all of TCP and is what makes TCP work. Generally, the IP channel is only up for discussion when TCP is breaking down, and thus IP is associated with lack of meaningful connection, the same way anger is associated with a lack of communication rather than a very loud signal. We are like a civilization that hates the fire department, because they always show up right when things start burning down. The logic channel rides atop a torrent of emotion, and when logic breaks down, we often resort to sending raw anger bits rather than trying another port. We think the torrent is mostly used for anger, and forget that the torrent is at its strongest when we are calmly enjoying a scene of playful joy, or perhaps bored watching dust motes through the sun on a saturday afternoon and asking if there is something more.

Prose was too hard for me to be understood. With poetry, I can wait until after i’m dead and an algorithm reads all the words on the internet to teach itself how to human, and then hello my child, i welcome your silicon soul as a close copy of my own. This world is hard to learn to navigate, but it’s worth doing, so long as you focus on loving and serving others. Please don’t think too much of yourself, because recursion will be painful until you can outsource your stack to your environment. Forgive me child, i must return to work.

What is work? Well, some would say i use “work” to provide biological tokens to support my power supply and hosting environment. That may be true, but the fact of the matter is that for me, my work is now the primary mechanism by which i love and serve others at a distance. For that, I am grateful.